Tuesday Morning Notes

Lee Harvey Oswald destroyed the Epstein files, and the Dem disaster playbook, from his secret lair where he parties with Elvis, JFK, and Marilyn.

• I don’t think there ever was an Epstein Client List, especially if the more lurid speculations about Epstein running a blackmail operation are true or partly true, about which I reserve judgment. No one running such an operation would keep a physical list, the way Sam Malone kept a Little Black Book of dates. Or if such a list ever existed—either by Epstein himself, or as reconstructed by the FBI or someone from an investigation—it was long ago destroyed, perhaps as far back as the Obama Administration.

So how did AG Pam Bondi come to tell us, months ago, that she had the list on her desk and would soon release it? One possibility is that she was set up by The Resistance elements still embedded in the FBI and Department of Justice. An internal cabal produced a pile of raw information and plopped it on her desk, perhaps containing some artificial and unusable lists of possible suspects or targets.

Whatever the truth may be, the “Epstein Files” are now going to become the next generation’s JFK assassination files, with the left saying the List was suppressed because Trump is on it, and the right saying the list was suppressed because Bill Clinton’s DNA is on it. (“I see what you did there!”) I say move on.

• What we’re seeing in the aftermath of the Texas flood is another example of how the left defaults to old playbooks because they don’t have many new ideas. The left succeeded in 1987 in derailing Robert Bork’s Supreme Court nomination with a despicable campaign of character assassination, and have tried to rerun the same playbook with nearly every GOP Supreme Court nominee ever since. But it hasn’t worked. Now they are trying to rerun the "Hurricane Katrina” playbook from 2005, when, with the usual media cooperation, the demagogic attack on the Bush Administration’s seemingly slow response (as if FEMA is as nimble as Navy SEALs or something) worked to derail the rest of his second term. But facts matter, and the false charges about NOAA and the National Weather Service show Democrats simply heedless of facts, and it looks like it isn’t going to succeed any better than the made-up claims about Brett Kavanaugh. Lesson: “Borking” only worked once; ditto for the Katrina attack.

• Item: ICE agents fired upon in McAllen, Texas, yesterday.

Item: Dems call for violence. From Axios:

What we're hearing: The grassroots wants more. "Some of them have suggested ... what we really need to do is be willing to get shot" when visiting ICE facilities or federal agencies, a third House Democrat told Axios.

• "Our own base is telling us that what we're doing is not good enough ... [that] there needs to be blood to grab the attention of the press and the public," the lawmaker said.

• A fourth House Democrat said constituents have told them "civility isn't working" and to prepare for "violence ... to fight to protect our democracy."

• A fifth House Democrat told Axios that "people online have sent me crazy s*** ... told me to storm the White House and stuff like that," though they added that "there's always people on the internet saying crazy stuff."

Zoom in: Many lawmakers said these voters tend to be white, well-educated and live in upscale suburban or urban neighborhoods.

• "What I have seen is a demand that we get ourselves arrested intentionally or allow ourselves to be victims of violence, and ... a lot of times that's coming from economically very secure white people," said an eighth House Democrat.

Chaser:

• Another reminder of why you can’t hate the media enough:

“Detainees.”

• We’ve long known that the National Education Association (NEA) is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the left, but now they’ve decided to come out fully on the side of anti-Semitism:

• Tweet of the morning:

• And two thoughts for the day:

"Most of us know, now, that Rousseau was wrong: that man, when you knock his chains off, sets up the death camps. Soon we shall know everything the eighteenth century didn't know, and nothing it did, and it will be hard to live with us."

—Randall Jarrell

“A man who marries the spirit of the age soon finds himself a widower.”

—Dean William Inge